Embedded in version 3.0 of the OpenType version of Arial is the following description of the typeface:

A contemporary sans serif design, Arial contains more humanist characteristics than many of its predecessors and as such is more in tune with the mood of the last decades of the twentieth century. The overall treatment of curves is softer and fuller than in most industrial style sans serif faces. Terminal strokes are cut on the diagonal which helps to give the face a less mechanical appearance. Arial is an extremely versatile family of typefaces which can be used with equal success for text setting in reports, presentations, magazines etc, and for display use in newspapers, advertising and promotions.

In 2005, Robin Nicholas said, "It was designed as a generic sans serif; almost a bland sans serif."[6][7]

Arial is a neo-grotesque typeface: a design based on the influence of nineteenth-century sans-serifs, but made more regular and even to be more suited to continuous body text and to form a cohesive family of fonts.

Apart from the need to match the character widths and approximate/general appearance of Helvetica, the letter shapes of Arial are also strongly influenced by Monotype's own Monotype Grotesque designs, released in or by the 1920s, with additional influence from 'New Grotesque', an abortive redesign from 1956.[8][9][10][11] The designs of the R, G and r also resemble Gill Sans. The changes cause the typeface to nearly match LinotypeHelvetica in both proportion and weight (see figure), and perfectly match in width.[12] Monotype executive Allan Haley observed, "Arial was drawn more rounded than Helvetica, the curves softer and fuller and the counters more open. The ends of the strokes on letters such as c, e, g and s, rather than being cut off on the horizontal, are terminated at the more natural angle in relation to the stroke direction."[10]Matthew Carter, a consultant for IBM during its design process, described it as "a Helvetica clone, based ostensibly on their Grots 215 and 216".

The Cyrillic, Greek and Coptic Spacing Modifier Letters glyphs initially introduced in Arial Unicode MS, but later debuted in Arial version 5.00, have different appearances.

History

IBM debuted two printers for the in-office publishing market in 1982: the 240-DPI 3800-3 laserxerographic printer, and the 600-DPI 4250 electro-erosion laminate typesetter.[13][14] Monotype was under contract to supply bitmap fonts for both printers.[10][13] The fonts for the 4250, delivered to IBM in 1983,[15] included Helvetica, which Monotype sub-licensed from Linotype.[13] For the 3800-3, Monotype replaced Helvetica with Arial.[13] The hand-drawn Arial artwork was completed in 1982 at Monotype by a 10-person team led by Robin Nicholas and Patricia Saunders[6][16]
and was digitized by Monotype at 240 DPI expressly for the 3800-3.[17]

IBM named the font Sonoran Sans Serif due to licensing restrictions and the manufacturing facility's location (Tucson, Arizona, in the Sonoran Desert),[10][18] and announced in early 1984 that the Sonoran Sans Serif family, "a functional equivalent of Monotype Arial", would be available for licensed use in the 3800-3 by the fourth quarter of 1984. There were initially 14 point sizes, ranging from 6 to 36, and four style/weight combinations (Roman medium, Roman bold, italic medium, and italic bold), for a total of 56 fonts in the family. Each contained 238 graphic characters, providing support for eleven national languages: Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. Monotype and IBM later expanded the family to include 300-DPI bitmaps and characters for additional languages.

In 1989, Monotype produced PostScript Type 1 outline versions of several Monotype fonts,[15] but an official PostScript version of Arial was not available until 1991.[] In the meantime, a company called Birmy marketed a version of Arial in a Type 1-compatible format.[12][19]

In 1992, Microsoft chose Arial to be one of the four core TrueType fonts in Windows 3.1, announcing the font as an "alternative to Helvetica".[15][16][22]Matthew Carter has noted that the deal was complex and included a bailout of Monotype, which was in financial difficulties, by Microsoft. Microsoft would later extensively fund the development of Arial as a font that supported many languages and scripts. Monotype employee Rod MacDonald noted:

As to the widespread notion that Microsoft did not want to pay licensing fees [for Helvetica], [Monotype director] Allan Haley has publicly stated, more than once, that the amount of money Microsoft paid over the years for the development of Arial could finance a small country.[23]

TrueType/OpenType version history

Version 1.00 was supplied with Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Only included Windows ANSI.

Version 1.77 was supplied with Windows NT 3.5.

Version 2.00 (United States) was supplied with Windows 95 to Windows ANSI.

Version 2.00 was supplied with Windows NT 4.0 and non-US editions of Windows 95 and included WGL4, but no euro sign.

Version 2.01 was the beta euro font update.

Version 2.45 was supplied with Windows 98 in the US, adding Z-caron and the euro.

Version 2.50 was supplied with Windows 98 outside the US, also accessible in the US by installing multilanguage support, including WGL4 and the euro.

Version 2.55 was supplied with the Final Windows 95 euro update that shipped on 4 November 1998, it also included WGL4.

Version 2.76 or later includes Hebrew (designed by Baruch Gorkin[27]) and Arabic glyphs, with most of Arabic added on non-italic fonts. Also added were Vietnamese and Chinese Pinyin letters.

Version 2.82 added letters for Azeri (Latin and Cyrillic).

Version 2.95 added support for Thai.

Version 5.00 added support for Latin-C and Latin D, Phonetic Extensions, Greek Extended, Cyrillic Supplement, and completed Greek and Coptic, Latin Extended-B, IPA Extensions, and Latin Extended Additional and added new characters for the update to Unicode 5.0.

Version 5.06 added Unicode 5.1 support.

Version 6.80 added Unicode 6.1 support and extended Latin-C and Latin-D.

Version 6.98 added support for Latin-E and extended Latin-D and updated to Unicode 8.0.

Version 9.00 added support for Cyrillic Extended-B and C.

Distribution

TrueType editions of Arial have shipped as part of Microsoft Windows since the introduction of Windows 3.1 in 1992;[22] Arial was the default font.[1]

Since 1999, Microsoft Office has shipped with Arial Unicode MS, a version of Arial that includes many international characters from the Unicode standard. This version of the typeface is the most widely distributed pan-Unicode font.

Arial MT, a PostScript version of the Arial font family, was distributed with Acrobat Reader 4 and 5.

PostScript does not require support for a specific set of fonts, but Arial and Helvetica are among the 40 or so typeface families that PostScript Level 3 devices typically support.[28][29]

macOS (at the time known as Mac OS X) was the first Mac OS version to include Arial; it was not included in classic Mac OS. The operating system ships with Arial, Arial Black, Arial Narrow, and Arial Rounded MT. However, the default macOS font for sans-serif/Swiss generic font family is Helvetica. The bundling of Arial with Windows and macOS has contributed to it being one of the most widely distributed and used typefaces in the world.

In 1996, Microsoft launched the Core fonts for the Web project to make a standard pack of fonts for the Internet. Arial in TrueType format was included in this project. The project allowed anyone to download and install these fonts for their own use (on end user's computers) without any fee. The project was terminated by Microsoft in August 2002, allegedly due to frequent EULA violations.[30][31][32] For MS Windows, the core fonts for the web were provided as self-extracting executables (.exe); each included an embedded cabinet file, which can be extracted with appropriate software. For the Macintosh, the files were provided as BinHexedStuffIt archives (.sit.hqx). The latest font version that was available from Core fonts for the Web was 2.82, published in 2000. Later versions (such as version 3 or version 5 which include many new characters) were not available from this project. A Microsoft spokesman declared in 2002 that members of the open source community "will have to find different sources for updated fonts. ... Although the EULA did not restrict the fonts to just Windows and Mac OS, they were only ever available as Windows .exe's and Mac archive files."[30] The chief technical officer of Opera Software cited the cancellation of the project as an example of Microsoft resisting interoperability.[33]

Arial Black: Arial Black, Arial Black Italic. This weight is known for being particularly heavy. This is because the face was originally drawn as a bitmap, and to increase the weight, stroke widths for bold went from a single pixel width to two pixels in width, but only supports Latin, Greek and Cyrillic.

Arial Alternative

Arial Alternative Regular and Arial Alternative Symbol are standard fonts in Windows ME, and can also be found on Windows 95 and Windows XP installation discs, and on Microsoft's site.[35] Both fonts are Symbol-encoded. These fonts emulate the monospaced font used in Minitel/Prestelteletext systems, but vectorized with Arial styling. The fonts are used by HyperTerminal.

Code page variants

Arial Baltic, Arial CE, Arial Cyr, Arial Greek, Arial Tur are aliases created in the FontSubstitutes section of WIN.INI by Windows. These entries all point to the master font. When an alias font is specified, the font's character map contains different character set from the master font and the other alias fonts.

Arial Unicode is a version supporting all characters assigned with Unicode 2.1 code points.

Arial Nova

Arial Nova's design is based on the 1982's Sonora Sans bitmapped fonts,[36][37] which were in fact Arial renamed to avoid licensing issues. It was bundled with Windows 10, and is offered free of charge on Microsoft Store.[38] It contains Regular, Bold and Light weights, corresponding italics and corresponding Condensed widths.

Monotype/Linotype retail versions

Arial

The TrueType core Arial fonts (Arial, Arial Bold, Arial Italic, Arial Bold Italic) support the same character sets as the version 2.76 fonts found in Internet Explorer 5/6, Windows 98/ME.

Free alternatives

Arial is a proprietary typeface[39] to which Monotype Imaging owns all rights, including software copyright and trademark rights (under U.S. copyright law, Monotype cannot legally copyright the shapes of the actual glyphs themselves).[40] Its licensing terms prohibit derivative works and free redistribution.[41][42][43][44][45][46][47]

Liberation Sans is a metrically equivalent font to Arial developed by Ascender Corp. and published by Red Hat in 2007, initially under the GPL license with some exceptions.[48] Versions 2.00.0 onwards are published under SIL Open Font License.[49] It is used in some GNU/Linux distributions as default font replacement for Arial.[50] Liberation Sans Narrow is a metrically equivalent font to Arial Narrow contributed to Liberation fonts by Oracle in 2010,[51] but is not included in 2.00.0.[52] Google commissioned a variation named Arimo for Chrome OS.

FreeSans, a free font descending from URW++ Nimbus Sans L, which in turn descends from Helvetica.[39][56] It is one of free fonts developed in GNU FreeFont project, first published in 2002. It is used in some free software as Arial replacement or for Arial font substitution.

TeX Gyre Heros, a free font descending from URW++ Nimbus Sans L, which in turn descends from Helvetica.[57] It is one of free fonts developed by the Polish TeX Users Group (GUST), first published in 2007. It is licensed under the GUST Font License.

Uses

SM used in City or Center since 2010, later in 2011 upgraded Capitalized after used in SM City San Pablo.

^ abcdBoag, Andrew (14 October 1996). "Have you ever thought about the LaserWriter fonts and how you got them?". Typo-L (Mailing list). Retrieved 2011. "Monotype's first contract for the IBM 4250 included [...] Helvetica (sub-licensed from Lino) [...] When it came to the 3800 laser printer I think IBM wanted a functional equivalent to Helvetica to save on the licensing wrangles, and this is when the Arial bitmaps were first created. But IBM named all the fonts in the machine after rivers in Colorado (!) so it was initially called Sonoran Sans." Boag is a former Monotype employee.

^The 4250 prototype debuted at Drupa in 1982, but the production model 4250/II wasn't on the market until 1984.

^ abcdWallis, Lawrence W. "About Us: The Monotype Chronicles". Monotype Imaging. Archived from the original on 26 July 2011. Retrieved 2011. 1983 [...] Monotype supplied IBM with digital fonts for its 600 dpi 4250 Printer operating on the principle of electro-erosion of the coated surface of a laminated substrate. [...] 1989 - Monotype issued first fonts in the PostScript Type 1 format containing 'hinted' refinements under license from Adobe Systems. [...] 1990 - Monotype Typography licensed to Microsoft a set of 13 core fonts in the TrueType format for use in the Windows and OS/2 environments. It was an association that burgeoned further with release of additional TrueType font packages in 1992 and afterwards.

^ abcRobin Nicholas bio at Ascender Corporation by Monotype Imaging website [blacklisted, so direct link not available] "[Robin Nicholas] in 1982 developed a sans serif typeface for bitmap font laser printers which was later developed, with Patricia Saunders, into the Arial typeface family - chosen by Microsoft as a core font for Windows 3.1 (and subsequent versions)"

^"IBM Typographic Fonts for IBM 3800 Printing Subsystem Model 3 [announcement letter 284-040]". 7 February 1984. The fonts, designed for use with the IBM 3800 Printing Subsystem Model 3, consist of proportionally spaced, digitized, alphabetic character, and other forms in sizes ranging from 4 to 36 points (approximately 1/18-inch to 1/2-inch) in height. Each character pattern is printed at a density of 240 × 240 dots (pels) per square inch. Letter forms were digitized by The Monotype Corporation, Limited, from original artwork. The digitization was done at 240 × 240 dots (pels) per square inch expressly for the IBM 3800 Printing Subsystem Model 3.

^A Guide to Understanding AFP Fonts(PDF), International Business Machines Corporation, 30 December 1999, retrieved 2011, The Sonoran font products were created to provide AFP customers with two of the most popular typefaces: Times New Roman and Arial (Monotype's equivalent of Helvetica). Due to licensing requirements in place at the time, the type family names used for the IBM-supplied versions of these fonts were changed from Times New Roman to Sonoran Serif and from Arial to Sonoran Sans Serif. These 240 dpi-only fonts were extensively hand-edited. Since the characters in the fonts were not derived from common databases, there is no linear progression of character size as point size increases, a requirement for migration to outline fonts. [...] Since the linearity issue cannot be resolved (each character in each point size is unique and not linearly related to the same character in any other point size) there will be no outline font support for the Sonoran fonts and the migration path will stop at 300-pel..

^Steve Matteson bio at Ascender Corporation by Monotype Imaging website [blacklisted, so direct link not available] "In 1990 Steve was hired by Monotype Typography as a contractor to aid in the production of Microsoft's first TrueType fonts."

^ ab"New features in Windows 3.1". Microsoft. 16 November 2006. Retrieved 2008. Windows 3.1 includes the new TrueType scalable-font technology...Four TrueType scalable-font families will ship with all copies of Windows 3.1: Arial (alternative to Helvetica), Times New Roman, Courier, and Symbol.